Electrical cables are often used to carry electrical data signals or power from one device to another. At some point the cable must be terminated where it connects to the device or to a plug or connector which may be plugged into the device. It is well known that high speed electrical performance heavily depends on proper cable termination in order to insure mechanical and electrical integrity.
Referring to FIG. 1, there is illustrated a popular method for terminating cables, such as micro-coaxial cables, commonly referred to simply as micro-coax. A micro-coax cable 100 may include a central signal wire 102 covered in a signal wire insulator 104, a conductive coaxial shield 106 surrounding the insulator 104, a shield insulator 107 may be present, and finally an outer insulative sheath 108. The cables 100 are stripped as shown. Often, the cables 100 occur in differential pairs with one cable signal wire 102 carrying signal Ss+ and the other carrying Ss−.
One current cable termination solution typically involves soldering the wires 102 to stamp-and-formed contacts 112 in a cable plug. In some cases, a small piece of printed circuit board (PCB) 110 may be inserted in the cable plug and the wires 102 are soldered 114 onto the PCB pads. The contacts or the PCB pads are arranged in a row, and long strip length of wire 102 is often necessary in order to solder the wire 102 onto the contacts or pads 112. In the case of a micro-coax cable, an additional metal ground bar 116 is needed to tie the cable shields 106 to the ground 118. The ground bar 116 may be a conductive metal strip runs across all of the cable shields and ties them to a ground cable 118, in some cases.